Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Abdul Rahim Rabbani Dies After 20 Years of Medical Neglect by the US and Inadequate Care Since His Release

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Sad news from Pakistan, where, on Friday November 1, former Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani (ISN 1460) died at just 57 years of age. Abdul Rahim is on the right in the photo, with former Pakistani Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan in the center and Abdul Rahim’s younger brother Ahmed on the left.

Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, the brothers had lived in Saudi Arabia, where their uncle was the imam of a mosque in Medina, and held Pakistani passports, but they were seized in Karachi during a number of house raids on September 11, 2002, and were then held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for a year and a half before arriving at Guantánamo in September 2004, where they were held without charge or trial for 18 and a half years until their release in February 2023.

The US authorities liked to claim that the brothers were “Al-Qaeda facilitators”, but they clearly had no evidence, as neither man was ever charged in the prison’s court system, the military commissions, and it seemed much more probable that they were, as they attested, a chef and a taxi driver. Nevertheless, they were repeatedly recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by various high-level government review processes until May 2021, when Abdul Rahim was recommended for release by a Periodic Review Board, with a similar recommendation for Ahmed following in October 2021.

Although Ahmed had been known as a long-term hunger striker in Guantánamo, and also as an artist, Abdul Rahim was much quieter. For his PRB in 2021, his attorney, Agnieszka Fryszman, who had represented him since 2006, told the review board panel that “he has kept himself busy with simple pursuits. He sweeps and cleans his block, for example, and stays away from conflict.”

As CAGE International explained in an obituary, Abdul Rahim had been suffering from a stomach illness in the days before his death, but was unable to be looked after properly because of “the paucity of social care and rehabilitation services provided to those released.” CAGE noted that the brothers had been left “without any provision by the governments of the US or Pakistan, being forced to rely on assistance from private individuals to help with the acclimatisation to freedom.”

CAGE also called for “a fair restitution and provision to be made for all those released from Guantánamo Bay — including housing, medical and mental health facilities, and provision to reintegrate into the societies they are sent.”

CAGE’s demands echoed those of Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, who produced a devastating report about Guantánamo in June 2023 after visiting the prison in February, in which she highlighted the arbitrary and generally inadequate provisions for the welfare of men released from Guantánamo.

As she noted on X, when she shared the obituary, quoting from her report, “Once the detainees are transferred, there does not appear to be any adequate system in place by the US Government to address the health, welfare, employment, housing, or well-being of those transferred, including the failure of receiving governments to respect the rights of those transferred.” As she added, on X, “The experience of many men [released from Guantánamo] includes penury, vulnerability and profound ongoing harm. All these men, including Mr. Rabbani, are victims of torture. He and they deserved better.”

Former Pakistani Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, who had met and been photographed with the brothers after their release, was even more critical. In a post on X marking Abdul Rahim’s passing, he stated, “Pervez Musharraf handed over these two brothers, Abdul Rahim Rabbani and Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, one a chef and the other a taxi driver, to the US in 2002 for $5,000” — a plausible claim given that Musharraf, in his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, had bragged about receiving millions of dollars from the US in exchange for handing over hundreds of alleged — or invented — “terror suspects.”

Khan added, “It should have been that the state and state officials would have apologized to them, even tried to compensate them, but they did not get the millions of dollars that America gave to the government of Pakistan for these two innocent brothers. He [Abdul Rahim] was living a life of great poverty in Karachi. The Government of Pakistan didn’t issue him a National Identity Card even though I raised this issue repeatedly in the Senate.”

For Arab News Pakistan, Ahmed poignantly explained more of his brother’s story, stating, as the website described it, that he attributed his death to “inadequate medical care during a prolonged illness”, which “extended their suffering even after their transfer to Pakistan.”

“We spent over twenty arduous years together in Guantánamo,” Ahmed said, adding, “On Friday at 2am, he passed away in my arms.” As the website described it, he “recalled that both brothers briefly felt relief when they learned they would be handed over to Pakistani authorities, believing their ordeal would end.” However, as Ahmed described it, “our suffering continued. Over 19 months, we still lack identity cards. My brother had been ill for a long time, but we couldn’t access proper medical care without an ID.”

He added that his brother “fell ‘seriously ill’ more than 20 times, attributing it to injections administered upon their arrival at Guantánamo and the extensive torture they endured.” As he described it, “He suffered such violence that his hand was broken, his leg was broken and his private parts were damaged, ruining his family life. As he also explained, “When he passed away, we even faced difficulties in burying him because an ID card was required.”

“Overwhelmed by their circumstances”, as the website added, Ahmed “questioned why they were returned to Pakistan when their own government was unwilling to issue identity documents.” As he described it, “My dearest brother has left me behind. He did not have peace for even a single day after the arrest. What was our crime? What is our crime?”

Majid Nizami, an political analyst based in Lahore, called the Rabbani brothers’ arrest “a case of illegal abduction by state agencies of Pakistan,” which, he said, was later justified as “mistaken identity.” He added, “It’s unclear whether this was intentional by Pakistani agencies or severe negligence. It has not yet been determined who was responsible, and no one seems interested in addressing the issue.”

With Guantánamo, sadly, that is all too common an occurrence. Grave crimes have been taking place there for nearly 23 years, and yet no one admits responsibility, and no one is held accountable — and Abdul Rahim Rabbani, sadly, was just the latest victim.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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